The Devil's Advocate
by Ceridwen
Summary: Did our heroes inspire more than just heroics?


H:TLJ FF: "The Devil's Advocate"

**The Devil's Advocate Corner**

Hercules & Iolaus – Legendary Heroes or Early Marxist-Leninists?

**by Ceridwen**

A spectre is haunting the world -- the spectre of communism. God and mortal, freeman and slave, patrician and plebian, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, always stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, sometimes hidden, sometimes open fight. A fight that each time ended, either in a revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes. In the earlier epochs of history, we find almost everywhere a complicated arrangement of society into various orders, a manifold gradation of social rank. Karl Marx developed revolutionary communism almost 150 years ago and with the assistance of his close comrade-in-arms Friedrich Engels, he developed a comprehensive philosophical system, dialectical materialism, discovering the basic laws, which shape human history. 

Their idea: that the history of all existing society is the history of a struggle against oppression. 

But where their thoughts entirely original? 

Many centuries before Marx and Engels; in a time of myths and legends, when the Gods where petty and cruel and plagued mankind with suffering, one man dared to challenge the system already. Hercules, the Son of Zeus and his friend Iolaus travelled the Earth, battling the Gods and fighting for justice wherever an innocent would suffer. Their thoughts and ideas helped to develop a science of political economy that revealed the exploitation of the mortals (proletariat), and the inherent anarchy and contradictions of the capitalist mode of the Olympian Gods. 

Hercules developed his revolutionary theory in close connection with and to serve the human struggle of the people in the known world. Together with Iolaus of Thebes, he fought for the rights of the people, and their attempts to abolish the influence of Gods like Hera and Ares on the mortals, was in fact the first great attempt of the proletariat to seize power from the bourgeoisie. 

Through the tales of his Seven Labours and many other deeds, Hercules armed the world proletariat with an understanding of its historic mission: To seize political power through revolution and unity and to use this power to transform social conditions until the very basis for the cleavage of society into different classes is eliminated. Iolaus himself, during his time as King of Attica, introduced the idea of abolition of power of the few and initiated a system of equal representation for everybody. 

Hercules also led the struggle against the opportunists in the proletarian movement, such as Medeas Maximus, who sought to confine the struggle of the mortals to improving the conditions of wage-slavery without challenging the existence of this slavery itself. 

Together, the stand, viewpoint and method of Hercules and Iolaus could have formed the basis of Marx's and Engel's theories, and represents the first great milestone in the development of the ideology of the proletariat. 

With his motto "Killing never solved anything", Hercules even went a step further to show that the world was divided between the great majority, the oppressed nations and the peoples, and showed that the imperialist powers are forced to go to war periodically to re-divide the world amongst themselves. Hercules waged a life-and-death struggle against the Gods and the tales of his deed united the struggles of the oppressed peoples. 

After Iolaus' unexpected death in Sumeria, Hercules defended the proletarian dictatorship in Eire and Norse against enemies from within their divinity as well as from imperialist forces of the Roman invasion, lead by Julius Caesar. The son of Zeus carried forward the cause of socialist construction and transformation of the known world. Hercules might not have known it, but he fought in fact for an international communist movement and hundreds of millions of proletarians and oppressed masses of the world were increasingly propelled into struggle against the world imperialist system. 

Hercules' ideas consisted of thousands of truths, but in the final analysis they all boil down to one: one has to fight for what one believes in and together, we can make a difference! 


End file.
